Southern Garden History Society

About a year ago I stumbled upon a great on-line resource for people who are interested in garden history, particularly southern garden history. The Southern Garden History Society publishes the periodical Magnolia and past issues are available in .pdf format for you to spend cold winter evenings looking at. There is also a search feature that will let you look up whatever topics may be of interest to you. Don't expect a lot of breezy articles with beautiful photos. However, what you will find are scholarly, detailed articles covering a wide range of topics from stories about individual gardeners, historic trends, plant lore to garden preservation and more. Each issue contains several detailed book reviews, and there is also a link on the site to historic plant lists.

From my perusals I learned about Frederick Law Olmstead's travels through the south prior to the civil war, in which he referred to Norfolk as "a miserable, sorry little seaport town". I found a story about Peggy Martin and the Peggy Martin Rose which was the only survivor, other than a Crinum, from a garden that was under salt water for two weeks after Hurricane Katrina. Wesley Greene of Colonial Williamsburg wrote a very detailed article titled The Evolution of the Lawn. You can also read about the "myth of the colonial herb garden". I also enjoyed an article about Anne Spencer and her garden in Lynchburg, Va. She was an African American poet and gardener, a demographic one would erroneously think does not garden based on the dearth of published information.

If you are interested the link of the past issues of Magnolia is here.
The search feature can be found here.
Plant lists are here.
Finally, information about the society in general is here.